


Let's live the way we want to live

by hishn_greywalker



Category: Supernatural
Genre: F/M, Stanford Era
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-05-04
Updated: 2009-05-04
Packaged: 2017-12-03 22:44:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,888
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/703476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hishn_greywalker/pseuds/hishn_greywalker
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"I am just a boy working in a record store / Yes I moved to San Francisco just to see what I could be" | Sam takes off for college, and it's not all sunshine and roses.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Let's live the way we want to live

**Author's Note:**

> 1,900 words. Based off the song "White Men In Black Suites" by Everclear ([lyrics](http://www.azlyrics.com/lyrics/everclear/whitemeninblacksuits.html)/[song](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tdYIaN80KOE)). I have been thinking about this fic forever, so. Here it is, finally! Beta by Sara. For chat :)

Sam met Jess in the diner that was halfway between his apartment and the record store he worked at. She was gorgeous in a way not many girls were and sitting alone in a booth in the back at 4 am.

At night, Sam liked to come and study at Gina's. It was the only time he could really settle down and do school work, even if he tried to get some in at work and when he was between classes. But he was working a lot, and years of habit made it easier for him to study at night.

Gina, who liked to work the night shift even if she did own the place, often asked him how he could study through all the people who came and went, especially the drunk ones. He didn't really have an answer for her since he couldn't tell her that he'd gotten used to ignoring the sounds that came with living in a motel next to bars and had done more than his fair share of school work in the back of a '67 Chevy Impala that was blaring classic rock.

When he was in a bad mood, he usually put on something from the '60s, maybe the early '70s. Rod, who owned the record store Sam worked at, was pretty much in love with his knowledge of the classics. Sam could usually find an album based on a few somewhat correct lyrics.

Jess didn't fit into this life he'd built for himself. She wasn't what he would have expected to just drop in on his life, no matter how she did it. The first time he saw her, she was sitting across from Gina, almost in tears. Slowly, she started showing up more often, usually just around 2:30. She came with others sometimes, but more often, she was alone.

Sam didn't know who or what she was for a long time. He was pretty used to being ignored by pretty girls, having grown up in Dean's shadow and then moved on to being the kid who knew everything and never had time to do anything after school. The night Jess came into the diner and sat down across from him, asking what he was working on, he was shocked.

"I'm Jess," she told him.

He stared at her for a long moment before he remembered to introduce himself. "I'm Sam."

"I know," she said, grinning. "Gina says you come here all the time."

"You know Gina well?" he asked, curious despite the liberal studies test he had the next day.

"I work here on early morning shift. That's why I come here after I get off my night job—I don't really have time to go home and then come back. I figure I might as well get some studying in now."

"Oh," Sam said, at a loss as to how to continue the conversation. "I work over at Rod's from 5 till close, so I come here to study."

She raised an eyebrow. "Doesn't that place close up at 11:30?"

Sam nodded. "Yeah."

"And you're still here at 3 am?"

Sam shrugged. "Not always. But a lot. I have to do my homework sometime."

Jess laughed then, and Sam couldn't take his eyes off her. She was beautiful no matter what, but he'd never seen her laugh like that, and it made her light up. "You should laugh more," he told her.

She tilted her head to the side. "What?"

"You…" Sam paused, unsure for a moment. "You have a nice laugh."

Jess smiled at him, and she was almost as pretty as when she laughed. "Thanks, Sam."

He still didn't really know anything about the mystery that was Jess for weeks. She sat with him as often as not, her books spread on one side and his on the other. Gina usually just left them a pot of coffee and ignored them, but Sam didn't mind, and Jess didn't seem to, either.

When he finally found out more, they'd been sharing a table for almost two months, and spring finals were approaching. A couple of mostly drunk guys stumbled in not long after Jess got there, and when they saw her, they put up a fuss.

"Look, if it isn't Candy," one of them said, coming towards Jess. It wouldn't have mattered if they'd stayed right where they were, though, because there was only one other person in the diner, a night regular named Jack who tended to think they were somewhere on Mars.

He wasn't exactly sure why they were calling Jess Candy, but she seemed to know. "I'm off the clock, guys."

"Aw, baby, you don't need to be on the clock for us, do you?" the other one asked her.

She rolled her eyes, but she didn't seem surprised by the response. "Yeah, I do. Because it's a chore even then."

The boys didn't like that too much. One of them took a threatening step towards her, but then Jack was standing up and coming towards them and Sam was in front of her, keeping them away.

The boys didn't seem too impressed by him, but when one of them made to push him back, he let the last nineteen years of self defense training he'd had drilled into him since he could walk take over, and next thing the guy knew, he was face down in the table across the aisle.

Everyone looked surprised that Sam had done that but Jess. She just laughed. "My white knight," she called him.

He noticed she was a little tense, even after the guys had left, and he figured she was waiting for questions. He'd put it together, though, and figured he didn't really need to say much unless she did. He'd seen the strip club around the corner advertising Candy on its marquee.

He hugged Jess goodnight, just like every other night, and when she came in the next night, he slid a can of mace across the table. "Even knights have to sleep sometime," he told her with a grin. "Plus, I'm at work before you are, and we don't have the same schedule."

That wasn't totally a lie. They both had similar schedules with as many hours of work as they could pack into a week and school in the day. He worked at Rod's all day Saturday and a lot more on Sunday, and he knew he hurt for library time, so he was sure she did, too.

Jess never actually brought the topic of her job up that spring. In the summer, when they were both out of school, she asked him if he was still going to be coming in after work, and he said he was if she wanted him to.

Gina offered him a job then for the summer at least, midnight to 6 am in the back. Sometime in July, Jess asked him if he wanted to stick around till after her shift and get ice cream with her.

They still hadn't ever actually talked about the fact that she was a stripper in August when she came in one night with a black eye. She was furious but didn't look too hurt, so Sam didn't demand a name and a description right off the bat.

"I am going to fucking kill Johnny," she told him.

"Johnny?" he asked, giving her a glass of Coke so she could fiddle with something.

"The bouncer over at Bob's. He let some jackass get close enough that he grabbed me, and then he couldn't get his ass over there fast enough, so _I_ had to push the fucker off. _And then_ , the fucker _hit me_!" She was ranting, the hand not holding the Coke moving around as she explained the whole thing.

"Did you get him good for it?" Sam asked.

She paused and looked up at him before she burst out in laughter. "Yeah, Sam, I did. Thanks, babe," she told him, leaning up to kiss him on the cheek before she took her Coke out of the kitchen and settled down on a barstool.

Sam stayed on at Gina's in the fall, just working on the weekends. Sam and Jess continued to go out off and on, not to anything special, but just _away_. They went to ice cream and coffee shops and walks in the park. Once she took him to an art museum, and he made her go to the aquarium with him.

The aquarium was by far the most expensive thing they did. While neither had ever mentioned the fact that they were both working their asses off through college, they weren't unaware of it, either. At Christmas, when the two of them were picking up hours left and right while they could, Jess asked if maybe he wanted to move into her place, which was a little bigger than his studio and didn't have methhead next door neighbors.

When they went back to school in January, he was living with her. Gina had helped the move his few possessions and then given them a pie as a present.

Sam didn't talk about his family or where he was from. Jess liked to talk about her mother and her little sisters who lived up in Portland. She sent them money when she could, when she and Sam had a little extra, and Sam had never denied her that.

He knew that Dean knew he'd moved, though he wasn't sure how exactly, because he got a postcard from the middle of nowhere Mississippi that was blank except for a D in the corner. He threw it away and went for an hour long run to try and forget it.

Sam and Jess were pretty much the odd ones out with their friends. They never had a whole lot of time to do much outside of school, but they still managed to find a group of people who called them friends. Sometimes they would manage a night off on the same day, and they'd do things with the group, though more often than not, they spent it back at the apartment.

Sam didn't like to think about their lives as being unusual. Not because he cared what other people thought, not anymore, but because he'd run to Palo Alto to prove to himself—to Dean, to his father—that he _could_ be normal, he could be what everyone else was.

He hadn't realized when he'd run off that August that there were lots of different kinds of unusual and he and his family were just one of them. He had gone from one kind of odd to the next, and he wasn't sure at this point that he'd ever actually be normal.

He never told Jess any of that, mostly because for her to understand, he'd have to explain his past, explain his brother who knew where he moved to and his father who he'd been fighting with since he could remember. He'd have to explain his dead mother and his gypsy lifestyle.

He'd also come to the conclusion that if he couldn't live a normal life, he'd live _this_ life. He was happy enough, going to school and working and being with Jess. There wasn't any reason he shouldn't be.

At least for now.


End file.
